Aimed at decreasing the risks associated with food products, the Mongolian legislation sets the rules and requirements related to the packaging of some food products. The Law on Food safety of Mongolia as being the major legal source for the food sanitation relations, the “Procedure on determining and labeling of food raw materials and food products requiring the package and labeling” dated 2013 and the recently adopted “Standard for labeling of pre-packaged foods” with a code MNS 6648:2016 adopted by the Decree No. 64 of the National Standard Committee /the Mongolian Agency for Standard and Metrology/ provide required information to be included on the package.
According to these legal acts, food businesses shall necessarily state following information, including but not limited to the name of the food product, the name and address of the manufacturer, size, serial number of the product and the manufacturing date. The “Standard for labeling of pre-packaged foods” with a code MNS 6648:2016 sets out a more detailed standard to the information requirement. For instance, pursuant to Article 5.7.1/a/ of the Standard, the manufacturing date and the best before date shall be labelled. In case, the product’s best before date is not more than 3 months, the “month and day” shall be shown, while for the products with more than 3 months best before date – “year and month” shall be shown.
These standards are not mere ‘information instructions’ where the food companies may choose whether to follow them or not. Since, this legislation and standard are subject to comply with, there are several ways to impose penalties depending on the nature of the violation.
According to the Article 27.2 of the Law on Standard, technical regulation and accreditation conformity assessment, a citizen, company and the organization shall comply with the standards and technical regulation. Therefore, any violation of food standard and the Law on Food safety of Mongolia shall be a subject of penalty stated in the Law of Infringement and the Criminal Code. Pursuant to the infringement law /Sub-clause 4 of article 6.15/, that this infringement shall result into the seizure of properties and profits related to the infringement, compensation of damages, the person shall pay a fine of 1,000,000 MNT and the legal entity – 10,000,000 MNT.
The Criminal Code, however, does not explicitly state this type of Crime and provides only the crime “Sales and distribution of foods not meeting the health standards”, which requires that this violation should have caused a severe bodily harm or death. The person committing this crime shall be fined up to 27,000,000MNT or imprisoned up to 5 years.